Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Well, I'm officially halfway through
this game, and I'm starting to think that maybe it's not as bad as
I've been lead to believe.

I should add, though, that that's not
saying as much as some parties might think, as the bar's been set
pretty damned low, so being pleasantly surprised now that I'm forming
my own opinions isn't what one might call a difficult task.

So, anyway, when we left off last time,
we'd just cut Seifer's legs off at the knees, at which point, the
Sorceress magiced a hole in the floor to escape into the room below,
an auditorium, according to Squall. Naturally, we have to go after
her, which turned out to be easier than I made it, I guess. For some
reason, I was thinking the auditorium we were looking for would be
bigger than it turned out to be, so I started looking for the
entrance on the first floor. No luck, of course. Turns out, it's on
the second floor and only about the size of the one in the middle
school I went to.

When Squall and the others come in,
they instantly know something weird's going on when the Sorceress
isn't there yet. Turns out she must have gone back to revive Seifer
or something, because when she comes crashing through a sign that was
apparently not affected by her magic portal, Seifer walks on in
almost right behind her, looking like he's not so bad off after all.

The Sorceress says she knew this day
was coming and that she's gonna wipe the floor with us because we're
SeeDs and in her way as a result. We'll have to deal with Seifer
again first, though. The strategy guide I'm using said his HP was
lower but his attack was stronger. That was half true, anyway.
Seifer wasn't really that much better a fighter than he was in the
last fight a minute ago, game time, but his health was indeed lower
after just getting his ass handed to him.

After Seifer goes down for the second
time in one day, we get a shot at the Sorceress. I was expecting
this to be a harder fight than it was. Funny thing, this. Turns out
that our old nanny Edea is weak to the Sleep magic I've got
junctioned to Squall's sword in spite of being possessed by an evil
demon from the future, so it was a relatively easy task to keep her
asleep while everybody stocked up on Demi spells. A few hits from
Diablos alongside regular weapons makes this way easier than I'd
expected.

All of this is making it sound like I'm
a better player than I really am. If I'd realized I'd be doing what
I'm doing what I'm doing when I bought the computer I'm using, I'd be
doing this in video to show that I actually kind of suck at most of
the games I play for this. As is, though, I've been buying computers
with the intent of being a writer more than a video person.

Once Edea gets sufficiently slapped
around, there's a burst of energy or something that comes out of her
head, after which she comes to her senses. The side effect is that
Rinoa's in some sort of coma. And somehow, Seifer managed to get up
and walk away again, too.

Now that Edea's momentarily not
possessed, she calls the remaining party members by name and says she
was waiting for this day to come even though it scares the hell out
of her now that it's finally here, and she's not sure if that's good
or bad. As Quistis tells us that something's terribly wrong with
Rinoa, Disk Two of four ends, and Disk Three starts with Squall
waking up in his bed again, wondering if it's finally over. It's
not, of course, but for the moment, all our supposed hero can do is
go check on Rinoa, who's still in a coma a couple hours after getting
knocked into one.

While he's in the infirmary, Quistis
calls Squall to the command deck to assign a party to actually go
into the orphanage and talk to Edea now that she's not the Sorceress
for the time being. But that's for next time, because I've been up
for too long and my sleep cycle's gotten more than a little off
lately. On the way to Squall's quarters to save, I came across Zell,
who asked about Rinoa, then said she'd snap out of her coma
eventually. Yeah, because people in comas never die without coming
around, right?

But we'll get to find out about all
that later. Until then, there's one thing I've been kind of
wondering about for awhile now and didn't really think too much about
until I sat down to play this session. Where the hell has Cid been
in all of this? I know his health wasn't exactly great after all
that business with the missile attack and Norg at the beginning of
the disk, but the implication is that it had been at least several
days, in game, between then and when we finally got to Trabia Garden.
One would think that by then he would have been well enough to at
least have somebody take him around in a wheelchair to look at the
damage to Trabia. After all, this whole Garden business, and
especially Balam Garden has been the guy's whole life for at least as
long, and probably longer than any of the main characters have been
alive, and now one of the three has been blown the hell up and the
remaining two are actively at war with one another. Worse yet, all
this is the doing of none other than his own wife, and the guy is
nowhere to be seen.

Maybe it's because Cid somehow reminds
me of my own dad in some small way, and I'm thinking back to when he
had his hip replaced a couple years back. Soon as he was well enough
to be up and around in anything like a meaningful way, he was having
my mom, and me when I was available, put him in the car and take him
out to look at things out of town, or over to his mother's house to
see how she was doing. From what I could tell, Cid wasn't quite that
bad off, healthwise, and yet, he told Squall not to give him reports
on what's going on, and he's seemingly not been interested in what
has been most of his life for a long damn time for awhile now. Maybe
that'll change at the orphanage, but we'll find that out next time.
For now, it's time for me to sleep and maybe get back on a better
cycle again.